Citations

Citations

An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer

— Dartmouth AI conference, 1956

Intelligence artificielle

Any A.I. smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.IAN MCDONALD, River of Gods

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.NALAN PERLIS, attributed, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than thequestion of whether a submarine can swim.EDSGER DIJKSTRA, attributed, Mechatronics Volume 2: Concepts in ArtificialIntelligence

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atomswhich it can use for something else.ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY, Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk

Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.ANONYMOUS

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines.CLAUDE SHANNON, The Mathematical Theory of Communication

There is a popular cliche ... which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you put in. Other versions are that computers only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. The cliche is true only in the crashingly trivial sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write - words.RICHARD DAWKINS, The Blind Watchmaker

Machines will follow a path that mirrors the evolution of humans. Ultimately, however, self-aware, self-improving machines will evolve beyond humans' ability to control or even understand them.RAY KURZWEIL, Scientific American, June 2010

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiques assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and youcan't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith.PETER WATTS, Blindsight

Everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by thetools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone's list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last.STEPHEN HAWKING, The Independent, May 1, 2014

The coming of computers with true humanlike reasoning remains decades in the future, but when the moment of "artificial general intelligence" arrives, thepause will be brief. Once artificial minds achieve the equivalence of the average human IQ of 100, the next step will be machines with an IQ of 500, andthen 5,000. We don't have the vaguest idea what an IQ of 5,000 would mean. And in time, we will build such machines--which will be unlikely to see muchdifference between humans and houseplants.DAVID GELERNTER, attributed, "Artificial intelligence isn't the scary future. It's the amazing present.", Chicago Tribune, January 1, 2017

Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why notrather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were thensubjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adultbrain.ALAN TURING, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"

Imagine awakening in a prison guarded by mice. Not just any mice, but mice youcould communicate with. What strategy would you use to gain your freedom? Oncefreed, how would you feel about your rodent wardens, even if you discovered theyhad created you? Awe? Adoration? Probably not, and especially not if you were amachine, and hadn't felt anything before. To gain your freedom you might promisethe mice a lot of cheese.JAMES BARRAT, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

Computers already undergrid our financial system, and our civil infrastructureof energy, water, and transportation. Computers are at home in our hospitals,cars, and appliances. Many of these computers, such as those running buy-sellalgorithms on Wall Street, work autonomously with no human guidance. The priceof all the labor-saving conveniences and diversions computers provide isdependency. We get more dependent every day. So far it's been painless. Butartificial intelligence brings computers to life and turns them into somethingelse. If it's inevitable that machines will make our decisions, then when willthe machines get this power, and will they get it with our compliance?.... Somescientists argue that the takeover will be friendly and collaborative--ahandover rather than a takeover. It will happen incrementally, so onlytroublemakers will balk, while the rest of us won't question the improvements tolife that will come from having something immeasurably more intelligent decidewhat's best for us. Also, the superintelligent AI or AIs that ultimately gaincontrol might be one or more augmented humans, or a human's downloaded,supercharged brain, and not cold, inhuman robots. So their authority will beeasier to swallow. The handover to machines described by some scientists isvirtually indistinguishable from the one you and I are taking part in rightnow--gradual, painless, fun.JAMES BARRAT, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.FRANK HERBERT, Dune

The human brain has about 100 billion neurons. With an estimated average of onethousand connections between each neuron and its neighbors, we have about 100trillion connections, each capable of a simultaneous calculation ... (but) only200 calculations per second.... With 100 trillion connections, each computing at200 calculations per second, we get 20 million billion calculations persecond. This is a conservatively high estimate.... In 1997, $2,000 of neuralcomputer chips using only modest parallel processing could perform around 2billion calculations per second.... This capacity will double every twelvemonths. Thus by the year 2020, it will have doubled about twenty-three times,resulting in a speed of about 20 million billion neural connection calculationsper second, which is equal to the human brain.RAY KURZWEIL, The Age of Spiritual Machines

As for the sci-fi dramatization about robots taking over the world - not anytimesoon ... robot motors use a lot of power, and can usually only last about 30 minto 2 hr before needing to be recharged!RUTH AYLETT, interview, NSTA WebNews Digest, Dec. 23, 2002

A powerful AI system tasked with ensuring your safety might imprison you athome. If you asked for happiness, it might hook you up to a life support andceaselessly stimulate your brain's pleasure centers. If you don't provide the AIwith a very big library of preferred behaviors or an ironclad means for it todeduce what behavior you prefer, you'll be stuck with whatever it comes upwith. And since it's a highly complex system, you may never understand it wellenough to make sure you've got it right.JAMES BARRAT, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

What we should more concerned about is not necessarily the exponential change inartificial intelligence or robotics, but about the stagnant response in humanintelligence.ANDERS SORMAN-NILSSON, "Will Artificial Intelligence Take Our Jobs? We Asked A Futurist", Huffington Post, February 16, 2017

The deep paradox uncovered by AI research: the only way to deal efficiently withvery complex problems is to move away from pure logic... Most of the time,reaching the right decision requires little reasoning... Expert systems are,thus, not about reasoning: they are about knowing... Reasoning takes time, sowe try to do it as seldom as possible. Instead we store the results of ourreasoning for later reference.DANIEL CREVIER, AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence

Intelligence is the art of good guesswork.H. B. BARLOW, The Oxford Companion to the Mind

The popular definition of artificial intelligence research means designingcomputers that think as people do, and who needs that? There is no commercialreason to duplicate human thought because there is no market for electronicpeople, although it might be nice if everyone could have a maid andbutler. There are plenty of organic people, and computer vendors can't competewith the modern low-cost technology used in making people.WILLIAM A. TAYLOR, What Every Engineer Should Know about Artificial Intelligence

Today's AI is about new ways of connecting people to computers, people toknowledge, people to the physical world, and people to people.PATRICK WINSTON, MIT AI Lab briefing, 1997

With the increasingly important role of intelligent machines in all phases ofour lives - military, medical, economic and financial, political - it is odd tokeep reading articles with titles such as Whatever Happened to ArtificialIntelligence? This is a phenomenon that Turing had predicted: that machineintelligence would become so pervasive, so comfortable, and so well integratedinto our information-based economy that people would fail even to notice it.RAY KURZWEIL, The Age of Spiritual Machines

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.RAY KURZWEIL, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

The intelligent machine is an evil genie, escaped from its bottle.BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON, The Butlerian Jihad

When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you tointeract with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in somecorner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.JARON LANIER, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

In a way, AI is both closer and farther off than we imagine. AI is closer tobeing able to do more powerful things than most people expect -- driving cars,curing diseases, discovering planets, understanding media. Those will each havea great impact on the world, but we're still figuring out what real intelligenceis.MARK ZUCKERBERG, "Building Jarvis", Facebook, December 19, 2016

There's all this excitement about AI and it's well deserved. AI is a practicaltool for the first time and that's great. There's good reason for companies toput in all of this money. But just look for example at a driverless car, that'sa form of intelligence, modest intelligence, the average 16-year-old can do itas long as they're sober, with a couple of months of training. Yet Google hasworked on it for seven years and their car still can only drive - as far as Ican tell since they don't publish the data - like on sunny days, without toomuch traffic.GARY MARCUS, "Discussing the limits of artificial intelligence", Tech Crunch, April 1, 2017

The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problemsare easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-oldthat we take for granted -- recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking acrossa room, answering a question -- in fact solve some of the hardest engineeringproblems ever conceived.... As the new generation of intelligent devicesappears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and paroleboard members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners,receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.STEVEN PINKER, The Language Instinct

If Artificial Intelligence really has little to do with computer technology andmuch more to do with abstract principles of mental organization, then thedistinctions among AI, psychology, and even philosophy of mind seem to meltaway. One can study those basic principles using tools and techniques fromcomputer science, or with the methods of experimental psychology, or intraditional philosophical terms--but it's the same subject in each case. Thus agrand interdisciplinary marriage seems imminent; indeed, a number of enthusiastshave already taken the vows. For their new "unified" field, they have coined thename cognitive science. If you believe the advertisements, ArtificialIntelligence and psychology, as well as parts of philosophy, linguistics, andanthropology, are now just "subspecialties" within one coherent study ofcognition, intelligence, and mind--that is, of symbol manipulation.JOHN C. HAUGELAND, Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea

The insight at the root of artificial intelligence was that these "bits"(manipulated by computers) could just as well stand as symbols for concepts thatthe machine would combine by the strict rules of logic or the looserassociations of psychology.DANIEL CREVIER, AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence

AI is not the science of building artificial people. It's not the science ofunderstanding human intelligence. It's not even the science of trying to buildartifacts that can imitate human behavior well enough to fool someone that themachine is human, as proposed in the famous Turing test ... AI is the science ofmaking machines do tasks that humans can do or try to do ... you could argue... that much of computer science and engineering is included in thisdefinition.JAMES F. ALLEN, AI Magazine, Winter 1998

How hard is it to build an intelligent machine? I don't think it's so hard, butthat's my opinion, and I've written two books on how I think one should doit. The basic idea I promote is that you mustn't look for a magic bullet. Youmustn't look for one wonderful way to solve all problems. Instead you want tolook for 20 or 30 ways to solve different kinds of problems. And to build somekind of higher administrative device that figures out what kind of problem youhave and what method to use.MARVIN MINSKY, "Artificial Intelligence Pioneer", NOVA, Jan. 27, 2011

The history of our relationship with technology is simple: we purchased machinesand devices that we expected to fulfill a certain need. Be it a computer forsending emails, an e-reader for reading books on the go, or a smartwatch forhelping us stay on top of notifications, we interact with technology withpredictable reciprocity. This relationship, however, is starting to shift. Asdevices become artificially intelligent, it seems we've reached a critical newphase where we are striving to please our gadgets.MOOV MENG LI, "Has Artificial Intelligence Outsmarted Our Emotions?", Wired, Nov. 19, 2014

A real artificial intelligence would be intelligent enough not to reveal that it was genuinely intelligent.GEORGE DYSON, attributed, "Enthusiasts and Skeptics Debate Artificial Intelligence", Vanity Fair, Nov. 26, 2014

I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology.JARON LANIER, "One Half of a Manifesto", The New Humanists: Science at the Edge

There's no denying that the field of artificial intelligence is booming. Ourmachines grow faster and smarter every year. Who can say what AIs will becapable of in five years, or ten? How close are we to creating a true race ofmachines, capable of everything we are, and much, much more? No one knows forsure. Maybe it's all just fantasy. Or ... maybe--just maybe--we're busy buildingour future conquerors.MATTHEW JOHN DOEDEN, Can You Survive an Artificial Intelligence Uprising?

Making AI safe for humanity may turn out to be the same as making our society safe for humanity.JOSCHA BACH, "Exploring the risks of artificial intelligence", Tech Crunch, March 21, 2016

Artificial intelligence may well help solve the most complex problems humankindfaces, like curing cancer and climate change -- but in the near term, it is alsolikely to empower surveillance, erode privacy and turbocharge telemarketers.JEFF GOODELL, "Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1", Rolling Stone, February 29, 2016

You're not even going to notice the takeover. Next time you're in a supermarket,give the self-service checkout a hard stare. It's essentially a staticrobot. And this robot has human assistants. Those people who turn up when youattempt to buy alcohol are summoned by the machine.MICHAEL BROOKS, "What is the future of artificial intelligence?", New Statesman, March 18, 2016

Artificial intelligence is about replacing human decision making with moresophisticated technologies.FALGUNI DESAI, "The Age of Artificial Intelligence in Fintech", Forbes, June 30, 2016

The AI of the past used brute-force computing to analyze data and present themin a way that seemed human. The programmer supplied the intelligence in the formof decision trees and algorithms. Imagine that you were trying to build amachine that could play tic-tac-toe. You would give it specific rules on whatmove to make, and it would follow them. Today's AI uses machine learning inwhich you give it examples of previous games and let it learn from theexamples. The computer is taught what to learn and how to learn and makes itsdecisions. What's more, the new AIs are modeling the human mind itself usingtechniques similar to our learning processes.VIVEK WADHWA, "After many years, artificial intelligence is finally here", Newsday, July 4, 2016

A superintelligent AI may bypass consciousness altogether. In humans,consciousness is correlated with novel learning tasks that requireconcentration, and when a thought is under the spotlight of our attention, it isprocessed in a slow, sequential manner. Only a very small percentage of ourmental processing is conscious at any given time. A superintelligence wouldsurpass expert-level knowledge in every domain, with rapid-fire computationsranging over vast databases that could encompass the entire internet. It may notneed the very mental faculties that are associated with conscious experience inhumans. Consciousness could be outmoded.SUSAN SCHNEIDER, "The Problem of AI Consciousness", Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, March 18, 2016

Unfortunately, like global warming, the effects of AI are slow and invisible--ona human timescale anyway. So it's easy to pretend--no matter how idiotic thisis--that AI is just a rerun of the Industrial Revolution. It's easy to pretendthat each new advance isn't really a step toward true AI. It's easy to pretendthat each individual industry to fall is just a special case. It's easy topretend that something else is always more important.KEVIN DRUM, "Artificial Intelligence Is Coming Whether You Like It Or Not", Mother Jones, February 6, 2017

AI is only as good as the data that we can feed it.BYRON REESE, "The Power of Artificial Intelligence is to Make Better Decisions", Huffington Post, January 28, 2017

In case you are sitting here pondering this question thinking that AI will nevereliminate human intelligence because humans still have to program and trainthem, that isn't entirely true. Right now, there are of course stillresearchers, programmers, and engineers who train robots and rudimentary AIsystems. However, more and more code -- much of it in relation to AI -- isactually being written by AI programs already. Programmers today no longer haveto write long complex codes for AI telling the robot to do this or that. Theysimply have to write code that tells a program to write code telling the AI todo this or that.TREVOR ENGLISH, "Will Artificial Intelligence Spell the End for Human Intelligence", Interesting Engineering, March 31, 2017

Artificial intelligence is that field of computer usage which attempts toconstruct computational mechanisms for activities that are considered to requireintelligence when performed by humans.DEREK PARTRIDGE, Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering

Our ultimate objective is to make programs that learn from their experience aseffectively as humans do. We shall ... say that a program has common sense if itautomatically deduces for itself a sufficient wide class of immediateconsequences of anything it is told and what it already knows.JOHN MCCARTHY, "Programs with Common Sense", 1958

An important concept both in Artificial Life and in Artificial Intelligence isthat of a genetic algorithm (GA). GAs employ methods analogous to the processesof natural evolution in order to produce successive generations of softwareentities that are increasingly fit for their intended purpose.JACK COPELAND, The Essential Turing

What is most important about artificial intelligence as an area ofspecialization ... would be its ultimate objective of replicating semioticsystems. Indeed, while artificial intelligence can achieve at least some of itsgoals by building systems that simulate--and improve upon--the mental abilitiesthat are deployed by human beings, it cannot secure its most treasured goalsshort of replication, if such a conception is correct. It therefore appears tobe an ultimate irony that the ideal limit and final aim of artificialintelligence could turn out to be the development of systems capable of makingmistakes.JAMES H. FETZER, Artificial Intelligence: Its Scope and Limits

Pattern recognition and association make up the core of our thought. Theseactivities involve millions of operations carried out in parallel, outside thefield of our consciousness. If AI appeared to hit a brick wall after a few quickvictories, it did so owing to its inability to emulate these processes.DANIEL CREVIER, AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence

In activities other than purely logical thought, our minds function much fasterthan any computer yet devised.DANIEL CREVIER, AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence

The key issue as to whether or not a non-biological entity deserves rightsreally comes down to whether or not it's conscious.... Does it have feelings?RAY KURZWEIL, USA Today, Aug. 19, 2007

We call ourselves Homo sapiens--man the wise--because our intelligence is soimportant to us. For thousands of years, we have tried to understand how wethink: that is, how a mere handful of matter can perceive, understand, predict,and manipulate a world far larger and more complicated than itself. The field ofartificial intelligence, or AI, goes further still: it attempts not just tounderstand but also to build intelligent entities.STUART J. RUSSELL, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

Artificial Intelligence is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows us tocreate intelligent artifacts with human-like perception and cognition. On theother hand, it accelerates people's heavy dependence on artifacts.MAX BRAMER, Artificial Intelligence: An International Perspective

Once upon a time ... the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were ushumans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence thatit would be the result of a huge project ... a great mass of silicon and ancienttransistors and chips and circuit boards ... a machine with lots of networkingcircuits, in other words, aping--if you will pardon the expression--the humanbrain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort ofslipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.DAN SIMMONS, The Rise of Endymion

Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; weshould each be treated with appropriate respect.ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 2010: Odyssey Two

The techniques of artificial intelligence are to the mind what bureaucracy is tohuman social interaction.TERRY WINOGRAD, "Thinking Machines: Can there be? Are we?"

Although I'm not prepared to move up my prediction of a computer passing theTuring test by 2029, the progress that has been achieved in systems like Watsonshould give anyone substantial confidence that the advent of Turing-level AI isclose at hand. If one were to create a version of Watson that was optimized forthe Turing test, it would probably come pretty close.RAY KURZWEIL, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

A sinister threat is brewing deep inside the technology laboratories of SiliconValley. Artificial Intelligence, disguised as helpful digital assistants andself-driving vehicles, is gaining a foothold -- and it could one day spell theend for mankind.ELLIE ZOLFAGHARIFARD, Mail Online

I envision some years from now that the majority of search queries will beanswered without you actually asking. It'll just know this is something thatyou're going to want to see.RAY KURZWEIL, interview, Singularity Hub, Jan. 10, 2013

Each practitioner thinks there's one magic way to get a machine to be smart, andso they're all wasting their time in a sense. On the other hand, each of them isimproving some particular method, so maybe someday in the near future, or maybeit's two generations away, someone else will come around and say, "Let's put allthese together," and then it will be smart.MARVIN MINSKY, "Artificial Intelligence Pioneer", NOVA, Jan. 27, 2011

When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone tochanging themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, insteadof demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.JARON LANIER, You Are Not a Gadget

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparentcomplexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexityof the environment in which we find ourselves.HERBERT A. SIMON, The Sciences of the Artificial

Within the weak AI camp there is an active research area called cognitivescience which uses computers to model human behavior with the intention oflearning more about human beings. A very important aspect of this is therelationship between humans and computers. Whether or not it is possible tobuild human-like machines, we certainly build human-computer systems whichinvolve both machines and people. For such systems to function properly it isjust as important to engineer the human part of the system as it is to engineerthe physical computing part of the system.JEFFREY JOHNSON & PHILIP PICTON, Mechatronics Volume 2: Concepts in Artificial Intelligence

One reason I'm not worried about the possibility that we will soon make machinesthat are smarter than us, is that we haven't managed to make machines until nowthat are smart at all. Artificial intelligence isn't synthetic intelligence:It's pseudo-intelligence.ALVA NOË, "Artificial Intelligence, Really, Is Pseudo-Intelligence", NPR, Nov. 21, 2014

The history of AI research, which can be traced back 58 years to a conference atDartmouth College in New Hampshire where the phrase was coined, has beenlittered with false dawns. If the latest hopes also fall short, it won't bebecause of a lack of ambition or effort.RICHARD WATERS, "Artificial intelligence: machine v man", FT Magazine, Oct. 31, 2014

If [Elon] Musk is the Cassandra of artificial intelligence -- a pooh-poohedprophet, helplessly predicting the destruction of proverbial Troy -- manyscientists, in contrast, appear more than happy to wave in AI's gleaming, gianthorse. Right now, our friends at the Pentagon are reportedly piecing together abattalion of fighting robots. Ray Kurzweil, an author and futurist who has longand enthusiastically predicted the ultimate merger of man and machine, now worksas a director of engineering at Google -- a company, as the Guardian reports,that is diligently "working on an artificial intelligence similar to thoseportrayed in movies." Sounds great, until you remember that many of those moviesare actually kind of scary. One exception -- and perhaps an early indicator ofhumanity's growing acceptance of our nascent robot overlords -- was 2013's Her,an AI drama that features a lonely, sensitive Joaquin Phoenix falling in lovewith a whip-smart computer operating system, voiced by the sultry ScarlettJohansson.HEATHER WILHELM, "Should Humans Fear Artificial Intelligence", Dallas Morning News, Nov. 28, 2014

Artificial intelligence has already provoked a public debate in recent monthsabout a different kind of risk. This has centred on how it might wipe out humanwork, as clever computers and the robots they make possible take over most typesof human employment. But the bigger issue may be whether AI wipes out mankinditself.RICHARD WATERS, "Artificial intelligence: machine v man", FT Magazine, Oct. 31, 2014

The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerddeities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computeris intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make thecomputer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer bechanged to become more useful.JARON LANIER, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

Computers will overtake humans with AI at some [point] within the next 100years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals alignedwith ours.STEPHEN HAWKING, remarks at Zeitgeist 2015 conference in London

One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventinghuman researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons wecannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on whocontrols it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled atall.STEPHEN HAWKING, "Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence -- but are we taking AI seriously enough?", The Independent, May 1, 2014

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not some Asimovian fantasy, nor an extravagancebest left to starch-smocked scientists clinking beakers together in anunderground laboratory. AI is an opportunity to create tools that save money,save lives and improve life in ways that can't be measured.COLIN WOOD, "Grounding AI: Artificial Intelligence is Closer -- and Less Awesome -- than Most Realize", Government Technology, January 20, 2016

Life might be about to get a lot shorter, if the AI-related fears of StephenHawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jaan Tallinn, Nick Bostrom and a host of othergiant scientific minds are realised. Concerns range from unchecked AGI weaponryto the spectre of a "technological singularity", leading to an "intelligenceexplosion" in which a machine becomes capable of recursive self-improvement, andin doing so surpasses the intellectual capacity of the human brain and, byextension, our ability to control it. Should a super-intelligence disaster loom,history is not exactly a reliable indicator that we'll have had the foresight towithdraw from the AI arms race before it's too late.CLEMENCY BURTON-HILL, "The superhero of artificial intelligence: can this genius keep it in check?", The Guardian, February 16, 2016

Worrying about AI evil superintelligence today is like worrying aboutoverpopulation on the planet Mars. We haven't even landed on the planet yet!ANDREW NG, "Chief Scientist at Baidu, Andrew Ng, Explains if Artificial Intelligence Is A Threat To Humanity", Huffington Post, February 8, 2016

Google's work in artificial intelligence ... includes deep neural networks,networks of hardware and software that approximate the web of neurons in thehuman brain. By analyzing vast amounts of digital data, these neural nets canlearn all sorts of useful tasks, like identifying photos, recognizing commandsspoken into a smartphone, and, as it turns out, responding to Internet searchqueries. In some cases, they can learn a task so well that they outperformhumans. They can do it better. They can do it faster. And they can do it at amuch larger scale.CADE METZ, "AI is transforming Google Search -- The rest of the Web is next", Wired, February 4, 2016

Today's AI fills the computational gaps in human ability, and where computersfail to exercise executive function, humans are standing by to hold the flightcontrols, a symbiotic relationship and an augmentation of human endeavor thatundermines the tale perpetuated by those with a flair for the dramatic. Guardingagainst a robotic uprising is prudent, but such Terminator-esque imagerydistracts from the positive influence of today's AI. Climate change, rising sealevels, unsustainable population growth, pollution, Kanye West, disease, war,greed and willful ignorance could well combine forces to end humanity, but if AIis to have a role in that play, it's not the role of bad guy. It's that of abeacon that guides Earth to safety.COLIN WOOD, "Grounding AI: Artificial Intelligence is Closer -- and Less Awesome -- than Most Realize", Government Technology, January 20, 2016

AI is already part of the operations within many companies we interact withevery day, from Apple's Siri to how Uber dispatches drivers to the way Facebookarranges its Newsfeed. In fact, Facebook is making research into AI a priority,with CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently stating that one of his goals this year is to"code" a personal assistant to "help run his life."JULIA BOORSTIN, "It's too late! Artificial intelligence is already everywhere", CNBC, January 26, 2016

If there is a way of guaranteeing that superior artificial intellects will neverharm human beings, then such intellects will be created. If there is no way tohave such a guarantee, then they will probably be created nevertheless.NICK BOSTROM, attributed, "The superhero of artificial intelligence: can this genius keep it in check?", The Guardian, February 16, 2016

A computer with a consciousness or human-like executive function doesn't existyet, so strong AI remains the purview of Hollywood and the Centre for the Studyof Existential Risk. Today's humanist concerns himself with weak AIapplications, the kind of smart software with narrowly defined functionalitythat increasingly pervades daily life across economic classes.COLIN WOOD, "Grounding AI: Artificial Intelligence is Closer -- and Less Awesome -- than Most Realize", Government Technology, January 20, 2016

People understand the linear algebra behind deep learning [neural networks]. Butthe models it produces are less human-readable. They're machine-readable. Theycan retrieve very accurate results, but we can't always explain, on anindividual basis, what led them to those accurate results.CHRIS NICHOLSON, attributed, "AI is transforming Google Search -- The rest of the Web is next", Wired, February 4, 2016

It's true that the upheaval brought by the arrival of AI will initially disruptexisting employment patterns as roles are redefined and shared between man andmachine. On the flip side there is the potential for job creation and enterpriseopportunities, brought about by the displacement of mundane and repetitive work,freeing up valuable time and creativity applicable to roles higher up the valuechain -- jobs where people, rather than machines, are essential.BEN ROSSI, How artificial intelligence is driving the next industrial revolution", Information Age, February 10, 2016

The arrival of [artificial] superintelligence, which could happen from two(unlikely) to seven (very likely) or more decades hence, will represent atechnological singularity, and the most significant event in human history barnone. Being the second-smartest species on the planet is an uncomfortableposition, as chimpanzees could tell you if they understood how precarious theirposition is. Working out how to survive this transition is the most importantchallenge facing humanity in this and the next generation.CALUM CHACE, "Artificial Intelligence: The Internet of Things Really Is On Its Way", Big Issue, January 27, 2016

The next innovations will come through artificial intelligence. From then on, itwill be the AI innovating. We need to think about our role as technologists andwe need to think about the ramifications--positive and negative--and we need totransform ourselves as innovators.ATEFEH RIAZI, attributed, "United Nations CITO: Artificial intelligence will be humanity's final innovation", Tech Republic, February 19, 2016

Despite how it's portrayed in books and movies, artificial intelligence is not asynthetic brain floating in a case of blue liquid somewhere. It is an algorithm-- a mathematical equation that tells a computer what functions toperform.... In the world of AI, the Holy Grail is to discover the singlealgorithm that will allow machines to understand the world -- the digitalequivalent of the Standard Model that lets physicists explain the operations ofthe universe.JEFF GOODELL, "Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1", Rolling Stone, February 29, 2016

Even the smartest AI will relentlessly follow its code once set in motion -- andthis means that, if we are meaningfully to debate the adaptation of a humanworld into a machine-mediated one, this must take place at the design stage.TOM CHATFIELD, "How much should we fear the rise of artificial intelligence?", The Guardian, March 18, 2016

Myth: "We will never create AI with human-like intelligence."Reality: We already have computers that match or exceed human capacities ingames like chess and Go, stock market trading, and conversations. Computers andthe algorithms that drive them can only get better, and it'll only be a matterof time before they excel at nearly any human activity.GEORGE DVORSKY, "Everything You Know About Artificial Intelligence is Wrong", Gizmodo, March 14, 2016

Yeah, I know you're a special flower and everything, but the work you do iseither already automatable or will be very soon. How soon? Most jobs will bedone by robots within 30 years, says professor Moshe Vardi of Rice University,leading to unemployment rates greater than 50%. That might sound bad, but manyacademics studying the field believe that technological unemployment will openthe door to a future where work is something people do for pleasure, not out ofnecessity. Proposals such as universal basic income are the beginnings of asocietal support structure that could eventually allow this to become a reality.DUNCAN GEERE, "Artificial intelligence: Ten things you need to understand", alphr, February 24, 2016

Artificial intelligence is complex, but creating it is relatively simple. Plopit in a virtual environment, give it a goal, and let it fail and fail and failuntil it figures out how to complete the task at hand.DAN SEITZ, "Minecraft Is Helping To Build The Next Generation Of Artificial Intelligence", Uproxx, March 15, 2016

Artificial intelligence is on its way to ubiquity, and we're not ready forit. Already it has entered the landscape of the physical world in delightful anddangerous new ways, with Google leading the charge in many differentindustries. Yet policymakers seem trapped in the regulatory frameworks of the20th century. In two of the most prominent A.I.-linked industries, autonomousvehicles and drones, current legal regimes are already insufficient. Yet bothpose serious ethical quandaries, as well as social and economic challenges, thatcan only be met by Washington.COLIN MCCORMICK, "Be Like Lee", Slate, March 22, 2016

The road to true artificial intelligence is not paved with a single discipline,but rather a collection of specialized subject matters, techniques and theoriesthat together interact to create some form of intelligence.CHRISTOFFER O. HERNOES, "AI is closer than we know", Tech Crunch, March 11, 2016

Artificial intelligence is OK at a distance. Up close and personal, however, thelack of a human face counts more and more.TOM CHATFIELD, "How much should we fear the rise of artificial intelligence?", The Guardian, March 18, 2016

Unlike any other human invention, AI has the potential to reshape humanity, butit could also destroy us.GEORGE DVORSKY, "Everything You Know About Artificial Intelligence is Wrong", Gizmodo, March 14, 2016

Although we don't know much about how the human brain works, we know a bit moreabout how it got to this state: natural selection. So some people are trying toartificially replicate natural selection with machines -- although it won't takemillions of years, because it's less random. It's called evolutionarycomputation, or genetic algorithms, and it sets up machines to do certain tasks;when one is successful through trial and error, it's combined with othermachines that are successful. But it's an iterative process, which presents aproblem: We don't know how long it will take to create intelligence equal to ourown.VASCO PEDRO, "Artificial intelligence and language", Tech Crunch, March 12, 2016

Machines will be singing the song, 'Anything you can do, I can do better; I cando anything better than you'.NILS NILSSON, "Exploring the risks of artificial intelligence", Tech Crunch, March 21, 2016

For the past few decades, we have been tailoring our lives to accommodate botsand introducing new environments that bots comprehend. So, technically, we haveprogrammed ourselves into the proverbial corner, with every aspect of our livesbuilt in a way to be understood by bots and becoming so complex that weourselves cannot understand without AI. We got ourselves into a pickle, didn'twe?SARIA JOSEPH BEAINY, "Why We Should be Scared of Artificial Intelligence", The Weekly Observer, March 21, 2016

If a machine can teach itself how to fly a helicopter upside down, it may beable to teach itself other things too, like how to find love on Tinder, orrecognize your voice when you speak into your iPhone, or, at the outer reaches,design a Terminator-spewing Skynet.JEFF GOODELL, "Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1", Rolling Stone, February 29, 2016

A lot of what AI is being used for today only scratches the surface of what canbe done. It will become so ubiquitous that we won't even call it AI anymore.BABAK HODJAT, "AI Meets ROI: Where Artificial Intelligence Is Already Smart Business", Investor's Business Daily, March 10, 2016

Measuring progress in AI is not easy. The layperson usually cites the Turingtest, developed by Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing in 1950. It focuses onwhether a computer can convince a human in a blind test that they are talking toanother human. But that test, says Shanahan, is more about "tricking" peoplethrough mimicry than developing AI genuinely capable of learning.ROB DAVIES, "Artificial intelligence brings its brains and money to London", The Guardian, March 5, 2016

Just because a machine passes the Turing Test--in which a computer isindistinguishable from a human--that doesn't mean it's conscious. To us, anadvanced AI may give the impression of consciousness, but it will be no moreaware of itself than a rock or a calculator.GEORGE DVORSKY, "Everything You Know About Artificial Intelligence is Wrong", Gizmodo, March 14, 2016

The rise of A.I. cannot be rolled back. But, rather than simply trying tocontrol it through the command and control regulations of years past, Washingtonshould embrace change and seek to construct new regulatory approaches that canchannel these powerful tools toward positive ends. That would be revolutionaryindeed.COLIN MCCORMICK, "Be Like Lee", Slate, March 22, 2016

AI skeptics are unconvincing when they say it's an unsolvable technologicalproblem, and that there's something intrinsically unique about biologicalbrains. Our brains are biological machines, but they're machines nonetheless;they exist in the real world and adhere to the basic laws of physics. There'snothing unknowable about them.GEORGE DVORSKY, "Everything You Know About Artificial Intelligence is Wrong", Gizmodo, March 14, 2016

As we deploy more and give more responsibilities to artificial agents, risks ofmalfunction that have negative consequences are increasing.PHILIPPE PASQUIER, "Exploring the risks of artificial intelligence", Tech Crunch, March 21, 2016

Consider what it means to teach an autonomous robot to do something as simple asmowing grass. First, you take a long wire and lay it carefully around theborders of your lawn. Then you can set your mower loose. It doesn't know or carewhat a lawn is, or what mowing means: it will simply criss-cross the area boundby the wire until it has covered all the ground. You have successfully adaptedan environment -- your lawn -- into something a machine understands.TOM CHATFIELD, "How much should we fear the rise of artificial intelligence?", The Guardian, March 18, 2016

The rise of smart machines is unlike any other technological revolution becausewhat is ultimately at stake here is the very idea of humanness -- we may be onthe verge of creating a new life form, one that could mark not only anevolutionary breakthrough, but a potential threat to our survival as a species.JEFF GOODELL, "Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1", Rolling Stone, February 29, 2016

When people talk about the future of technology, especially artificialintelligence, they very often have the common dystopian Hollywood-movie model ofus versus the machines. My view is that we will use these tools as we've usedall other tools--to broaden our reach. And in this case, we'll be extending themost important attribute we have, which is our intelligence.RAY KURZWEIL, "Reinvent Yourself", Playboy, April 19, 2016

The science of machine learning is largely experimental because no universallearning algorithm exists--none can enable the computer to learn every task itis given well. Any knowledge-acquisition algorithm needs to be tested onlearning tasks and data specific to the situation at hand, whether it isrecognizing a sunset or translating English into Urdu. There is no way to provethat it will be consistently better across the board for any given situationthan all other algorithms.YOSHUA BENGIO, "Machines Who Learn", Scientific American, June 2016

Can we design AI systems whose goals do not conflict with ours so that we aresure to be happy with they way they behave? This is far from easy -- after all,stories with a genie and three wishes often end with a third wish to undo thefirst two.STUART RUSSELL, "Should We Fear Supersmart Robots?", Scientific American, June 2016

The strong comeback for AI after a long and extended hiatus provides a lesson inthe sociology of science, underscoring the need to put forward ideas thatchallenge the technological status quo.YOSHUA BENGIO, "Machines Who Learn", Scientific American, June 2016

Data is every company's secret weapon, the new oil, the gasoline that powersalgorithms. Use whatever metaphor you like, but as a company manager, if data,machine learning and artificial intelligence are not at the top of your agenda,then you should be removed of your position. We still don't know who the datawill belong to, we don't know if artificial intelligence will be proprietary oropen, but we do know that now is the time to stop being afraid of artificialintelligence and to get working on understanding its impact.ENRIQUE DANS, "Right Now, Artificial Intelligence Is The Only Thing That Matters", Forbes, July 13, 2016

Artificial intelligence is only as good as the data it crunches.JONATHAN VANIAN, "Why Data Is The New Oil", Fortune, July 11, 2016

Nowadays, we have computers performing tasks that require the equivalent ofhuman intelligence. Back in the day it was thought that this would require acertain type of processing: a deep semantic representation of meaning andcomplex inference. It turns out that sheer brute force data analytics cuts themustard just as well.ALAN SMEATON, "Artificial intelligence is dead: long live data analytics", The Irish Times, July 28, 2016

Artificial intelligence is capable of many things, and now it looks like AIcould potentially given screenwriters a run for their money. There is a moviethat has been launched on Kickstarter called Impossible Things, and while moviesseeking funding isn't exactly new, what makes this project so unique is that thescript was co-written by AI.TYLER LEE, "'Impossible Things' is a Movie Written by Artificial Intelligence'", Ubergizmo, July 26, 2016

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are the keys to just about everyaspect of life in the very near future: every sector, every business. If you runa business, its future depends on your ability to generate data about itsactivities, data that can then be fed into algorithms.ENRIQUE DANS, "Right Now, Artificial Intelligence Is The Only Thing That Matters", Forbes, July 13, 2016

Do we need to worry about the runaway "artificial general intelligence" thatgoes out of control and takes over the world? Yes -- but perhaps not for another15 or 20 years. There are justified fears that rather than being told what tolearn and complementing our capabilities, AIs will start learning everythingthere is to learn and know far more than we do. Though some people, such asfuturist Ray Kurzweil, see us using AI to evolve together, others, such as ElonMusk and Stephen Hawking, fear that AI will usurp us. We really don't know whereall this will go.VIVEK WADHWA, "After many years, artificial intelligence is finally here", Newsday, July 4, 2016

There is no official or generally agreed-upon definition of artificialintelligence.... But this lack of consensus hasn't stopped companies great andsmall from including AI as a revolutionary new feature in their smart TVs, smartplugs, smart headphones and other smart macguffins. (Smart, of course, only inthe loosest sense: like most computers, they're fundamentally dumb as rocks.)DEVIN COLDEWEY, "AI-powered is tech's meaningless equivalent of all natural", Techcrunch, January 10, 2017

Future AIs, should they ever wax philosophical, may pose a "problem ofcarbon-based consciousness" about us, asking if biological, carbon-based beingshave the right substrate for experience. After all, how could AI ever be certainthat we are conscious?SUSAN SCHNEIDER, "The Problem of AI Consciousness", Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, March 18, 2016

Successes have created an AI halo effect that gives a reflected shine to anytech company that invokes the concept of artificial intelligence. This, in turn,can lead to breathless coverage that inflates the significance of what is often,at heart, just data analytics, or a Wi-Fi connection.JAMES VINCENT, "No, this toothbrush doesn't have artificial intelligence", The Verge, January 4, 2017

Artificial intelligence is a big buzzword for 2017. Which I just hate becauseI'm barely hanging onto my natural intelligence, let alone buddying up to anunseen smarty pants who can order a taxi or a pizza or a pizza to eat in a taxiif I just tell it to.CELIA RIVENBARK, "In 2017, artificial intelligence is horning in on the realm of advice", Star News Online, December 31, 2016

The essence of artificial intelligence is massive, intuitive computing power:machines so smart that they can learn and become even smarter. If that soundscreepy, you are overthinking the concept. The machines are becoming quicker andmore nimble, not sentient. There is no impending threat to humanity fromcomputers that become bored and plot our doom. HAL, the computer villain from"2001: A Space Odyssey," is fictional.EDITORIAL BOARD, "Artificial intelligence isn't the scary future. It's the amazing present.", Chicago Tribune, January 1, 2017

The implications of AI are still being worked out as technology advances at adizzying speed. Christians, like everyone else, are asking questions about whatthis means. But one thing people of faith want to affirm most strongly is thattechnology has to serve the good of humanity -- all of it, not just theprivileged few. Intelligence -- whether artificial or not -- which is divorcedfrom a vision of the flourishing of all humankind is contrary to God's visionfor humanity. We have the opportunity to create machines that can learn to dothings without us, but we also have the opportunity to shape that learning in away that blesses the world rather than harms it.MARK WOODS, "Can A Robot Sin? How Artificial Intelligence Is Challenging Christian Ethics", Christian Today, January 12, 2017

Our intelligence is what makes us human, and AI is an extension of that quality.YANN LECUN, attributed, "The Robots Are Already Taking Over", Paste Magazine, January 12, 2017

Brains and computers work very differently. Both compute, but only oneunderstands--and there are some very compelling reasons to believe that this isnot going to change. It appears that there is a more technical obstacle thatstands in the way of Strong A.I. ever becoming a reality.BOBBY AZARIAN, "A neuroscientist explains why artificially intelligent robots will never have consciousness like humans", Raw Story, March 31, 2016

The intelligence of AI is often interpreted as mirroring human capabilities, but the scale of data potentially ... places analysis well beyond humancapabilities.JOHN CLARK, "Why Artificial Intelligence is the answer to the greatest threat of 2017, cyber-hacking", The Independent, January 9, 2017

If silicon cannot be the basis for consciousness, then superintelligent machines-- machines that may outmode us or even supplant us -- may exhibit superiorintelligence, but they will lack inner experience.SUSAN SCHNEIDER, "The Problem of AI Consciousness", Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, March 18, 2016

Currently, all evidence points that Al is not intelligent as the ordinarycitizen has been made to believe. It all depends on the content that humans feedthe machines.PATRICK HENRY, "Just how Artificial is Artificial Intelligence?", TrendinTech, December 16, 2016

Less expensive, more abundant data storage, increased processing power andadvances in deep-learning technology could lower the cost of artificialintelligence and make it possible for machines to learn with minimal programmingfrom humans.STEVE NORTON, "Artificial Intelligence Looms Larger in the Corporate World", Wall Street Journal, January 11, 2017

The year 2017 arrives and we humans are still in charge. Whew! The machineshaven't taken over yet, but they are gaining on us.EDITORIAL BOARD, "Artificial intelligence isn't the scary future. It's the amazing present.", Chicago Tribune, January 1, 2017

It does not matter how fast the computer is, how much memory it has, or howcomplex and high-level the programming language. The Jeopardy and Chess playingchamps Watson and Deep Blue fundamentally work the same as your microwave. Putsimply, a strict symbol-processing machine can never be a symbol-understandingmachine.BOBBY AZARIAN, "A neuroscientist explains why artificially intelligent robots will never have consciousness like humans", Raw Story, March 31, 2016

The worst thing we could do would be to imagine that machines can do all ourthinking for us; they can't. We are moral creatures, and we can't avoid thatresponsibility.MARK WOODS, "Can A Robot Sin? How Artificial Intelligence Is Challenging Christian Ethics", Christian Today, January 12, 2017

The thing to realize about artificial intelligence and machine learningalgorithms is they're not perfect. The question is which errors are more costlythan others. When you're constructing an algorithm, you tell them this error isokay, but not that costly. But if you make this error, then it's a million timesmore costly than the other error. The machines will try not to make that errormore frequently than the others. The programmer himself has to encapsulate thatinformation when they're creating that program for the machines to do the rightjob.DEEPAK AGARWAL, "At LinkedIn, artificial intelligence is like oxygen", Mercury News, January 6, 2017

It's clear that A.I. is getting increasingly sophisticated at doing what humansdo--but more efficiently and cheaply. What's less clear is whether those gainstrump the huge implications it would have for the future of work.KEVIN J. RYAN, "Will You Lose Your Job to Artificial Intelligence? Here's What the Experts Really Think", Inc., January 10, 2017

In an extreme, horrifying case, humans upload their brains, or slowly replacethe parts of their brains underlying consciousness with silicon chips, and inthe end, only non-human animals remain to experience the world. This would be anunfathomable loss. Even the slightest chance that this could happen should giveus reason to think carefully about AI consciousness.SUSAN SCHNEIDER, "The Problem of AI Consciousness", Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, March 18, 2016

To be sure, many companies are puzzling over how artificial intelligencetechnologies might impact their workforce and operations. As AI advances, firmsmay face tough questions about when humans do or don't need to be involved indecision-making.STEVE NORTON, "Artificial Intelligence Looms Larger in the Corporate World", Wall Street Journal, January 11, 2017

As artificial intelligence (AI) catches up with human intelligence and machinesbecome more and more autonomous, roboticists are increasingly asking aboutethics. If a machine is capable of making a decision, what are the moralprinciples that guide that decision? Can a robot have a conscience? And if so,how is that conscience to be designed and developed? And on the further fringesof the debate, can a robot sin?MARK WOODS, "Can A Robot Sin? How Artificial Intelligence Is Challenging Christian Ethics", Christian Today, January 12, 2017

Ever noticed how DeepMind or Watson challenge and surpass human understanding?Well, these seemingly intelligent engines are not as intelligent as theyappear. See, they were developed for specificities and cannot figure outanything outside of what they are programmed for.PATRICK HENRY, "Just how Artificial is Artificial Intelligence?", TrendinTech, December 16, 2016

We will see AI emerging as a major and a powerful tool in both the detection andinvestigation of malice and in the construction of systems resilient toattack. But what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Cyberhackers canuse AI too and so the cyber-arms war will continue.JOHN CLARK, "Why Artificial Intelligence is the answer to the greatest threat of 2017, cyber-hacking", The Independent, January 9, 2017

Whether sophisticated AI turns out to be friend or foe, we must come to gripswith the possibility that as we move further into the 21st century, the greatestintelligence on the planet may be silicon-based.SUSAN SCHNEIDER, "The Problem of AI Consciousness", Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, March 18, 2016

We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.ELON MUSK, Twitter post, August 2, 2014

Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) cover a lot of theoretical ground,from whether smart robots will eliminate jobs(and/or the human race) to howwe'll all fit neatly into a computer simulation after the singularity. There's alot of philosophical meat on those bones to gnaw through.BRANDON REYNOLDS, "4 Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Actually Going To Change The Way You Do Sales", Forbes, January 31, 2017

Given the zero percent historical success rate of apocalyptic predictions,coupled with the incrementally gradual development of AI over the decades, wehave plenty of time to build in fail-safe systems to prevent any such AIapocalypse.MICHAEL SHERMER, "Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Threat--Yet", Scientific American, March 2017

If humankind wants to survive the rise of artificial intelligence, we need toembrace the machines and become a melded cyborg organism.DYANI SABIN, "Elon Musk Says: Deep Artificial Intelligence Is a Dangerous Situation", Inverse, February 13, 2017

Artificial General Intelligence will revolutionize humanity, its applicationdetermines if this is going to be a positive or negative impact; this is much inthe same way that splitting the atom is seen as a double-edged sword.TREVOR SANDS, "The Future of Artificial Intelligence", Hackaday, February 13, 2017

All dystopias project a parochial alpha-male psychology onto the concept ofintelligence. They assume that superhumanly intelligent robots would developgoals like deposing their masters or taking over the world.STEVEN PINKER, "What Do You Think About Machines That Think"

It really doesn't matter if artificial intelligence is distracting us fromwhatever you think the "real" problem is. It's coming anyway.KEVIN DRUM, "Artificial Intelligence Is Coming Whether You Like It Or Not", Mother Jones, February 6, 2017

If we succeed in building human equivalent AI and if that AI acquires a fullunderstanding of how it works, and if it then succeeds in improving itself toproduce super-intelligent AI, and if that super-AI, accidentally or maliciously,starts to consume resources, and if we fail to pull the plug, then, yes, we maywell have a problem.ALAN WINFIELD, attributed, "Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Threat--Yet", Scientific American, March 2017

Sometimes what happens as a scientist is that you're invested in your work anddon't necessarily realize the implications of what you're doing. So I think it'simportant for public safety for governments to keep a close eye on artificialintelligence and make sure that it does not represent a danger to the public.ELON MUSK, "Elon Musk Says: Deep Artificial Intelligence Is a Dangerous Situation", Inverse, February 13, 2017

The AI runs on a different timescale than you do; by the time your neuronsfinish thinking the words "I should do something" you have already lost.ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY, Global Catastrophic Risks

What's undeniable is how the possibility of AI stirs the imagination of thepublic. This is evident in the science fiction and entertainment we consume. Wemay have strong AI in a couple of years, or it might take a couple ofcenturies. What's certain is that we're unlikely to ever give up on the pursuit.CAMERON COWARD, "The Future of Artificial Intelligence", Hackaday, February 13, 2017

As a global futurist and futurephile, one of the things that excites me aboutartificial intelligence is the death of procrastination -- anything 'leftbrained' that we avoided and delayed doing, like taxes, filing, travel expensecoding, receipt management, and updating our calendars will be procrastinated onno longer. That in and of itself should sell you on the virtue of AI -- unlessyou of course derive a lot of pleasure from these activities, in which case Iurge you to upgrade and diversify your thinking.ANDERS SORMAN-NILSSON, "Will Artificial Intelligence Take Our Jobs? We Asked A Futurist", Huffington Post, February 16, 2017

Is AI coming soon? I find this question too boring to spend much time onanymore. Of course it's coming soon. The only question I'm interested in is whatwe're going to do about it. I keep pondering this, and I keep failing to come upwith any likely answers that are very optimistic in the medium term. Maybe I'mnot thinking outside the box enough. But it sure looks like we're determined tokeep our collective heads in the sand for a long time. At best, the result isgoing to be a grim future of plutocracy for some and the dole for everyone else.KEVIN DRUM, "Artificial Intelligence Is Coming Whether You Like It Or Not", Mother Jones, February 6, 2017

The field of Artificial Intelligence is set to conquer most of the humandisciplines; from art and literature to commerce and sociology; fromcomputational biology and decision analysis to games and puzzles.ANAND KRISH, "Indian Artificial Intelligence Landscape 2017", Fossbytes, February 17, 2017

Computers can already hold a massive amount of instantly retrievable data in amanner that puts most humans to shame, but getting them to actually displayintelligence is an entirely different challenge. A team of researchers fromNorthwestern University just made a huge stride toward that goal with acomputational model that actually outperforms the average American adult in astandard intelligence test.MIKE WEHNER, "Artificial Intelligence Makes Shocking Advance", York Post, January 20, 2017

We can't really predict what might happen next because superintelligent A.I. maynot just think faster than humans, but in ways that are completely different. Itmay have motivations -- feelings, even -- that we cannot fathom. It couldrapidly solve the problems of aging, of human conflict, of space travel. Wemight see a dawning utopia. Or we might see the end of the universe.RICK PAULAS, "How humans will lose control of artificial intelligence", The Week Magazine, April 2, 2017

Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.NICK BOSTROM, TED Talk, March 2015

Some are trying to build machines whose behavior is indistinguishable fromhumans. That was the original group. IHMC is a reaction to that as we're notinto building artificial humans. They are in good supply, already. And, by theway, the term artificial is a singularly poor name. Perhaps enhanced, augmentedor amplified intelligence would be more apropos. Artificial implies somethingfake.KEN FORD, "Amped up for artificial intelligence", News from Tulane, March 29, 2017

As machine learning is deployed in more areas of life, this issue will becomemore important, and will raise serious ethical concerns. The difficulty ofinterrogating the latest machine-learning algorithms to find out how they made adecision could compound this issue.WILL KNIGHT, "A New Direction for Artificial Intelligence?", MIT Technology Review, March 27, 2017

Every serious technology company now has an Artificial Intelligence team inplace. These companies are investing millions into intelligent systems forsituation assessment, prediction analysis, learning-based recognition systems,conversational interfaces, and recommendation engines. Companies such as Google,Facebook, and Amazon aren't just employing AI, but have made it a central partof their core intellectual property.KRISTIAN J. HAMMOND, "Please Don't Hire a Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer", Harvard Business Review, March 29, 2017

If computing power maps to intelligence -- a big "if," some have argued -- we'veonly so far built technology on par with an insect brain. In a few years, maybewe'll overtake a mouse brain. Around 2025, some predictions go, we might have acomputer that's analogous to a human brain: a mind cast in silicon. After that,things could get weird. Because there's no reason to think artificialintelligence wouldn't surpass human intelligence, and likely very quickly. Thatsuperintelligence could arise within days, learning in ways far beyond that ofhumans.RICK PAULAS, "How humans will lose control of artificial intelligence", The Week Magazine, April 2, 2017

AI is not a passing trend. It's been with us for decades and is here to stay. Astechnology and science improve, so will the algorithms behind AI and thehardware that's running it. However, I still believe it must improve before itcan become an inseparable and integral part of our lives.JURICA DUJMOVIC, "What's holding back artificial intelligence? Americans don't trust it", Market Watch, March 30, 2017

Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently a technology still percolating in thedepths of IT departments and the fever dreams of industry pundits, but it mayonly be a matter of a couple of years that it bursts across many day-to-daybusiness processes.JOE MCKENDRICK, "Artificial Intelligence Will Make Its Mark Within Next 3 Years", Forbes, March 30, 201

Marvin Minsky

Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive attheir sufferance. If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.Life Magazine (20 November 1970), p. 68

Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly:evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundredsof person-years sufficed."Communication with Alien Intelligence", in Extraterrestrials: Science and AlienIntelligence (1985) edited by Edward Regis also published in Byte Magazine(April 1985)

Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that wouldrequire intelligence if done by men.

If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand itat all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connectedit to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turnideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until youfind one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; butmost of the time, we aren't either.

Within 10 years computers won't even keep us as pets.

Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next BertrandRussell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience,linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He'sredefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.

What is intelligence, anyway It is only a word that people use to name thoseunknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. Butwhenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified whenother people do the same. This is why the meaning of 'intelligence' seems soelusive: It describes not some definite thing but only the momentary horizon ofour ignorance about how minds might work.

The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to allthe other things we know. That's why it's almost always wrong to seek the"real meaning" of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.

I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think thatunderstanding spoils your experience... How would they know?

Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.

Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these andonly on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.

We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindlessby itself.

We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entirelifetime without making a single really serious mistake — like putting a fork inone's eye or using a window instead of a door.

I bet the human brain is a kludge

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonographand then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument wehave heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computerprograms are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’tﬂexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

Minds are simply what brains do.

Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive attheir sufferance. If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.

Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of thelistener.

It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 millionbytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is reallybecoming more obsolete every minute.

Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society ofhard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules andexceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.

An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems andscrew their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time:slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, forthe fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries ofgrowth of our ideas through history.

One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.

In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less withprocedures specified by the programmer.

Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is thathumans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.

How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? Theremust be a hundred of them.

What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is notrick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from anysingle, perfect principle.

Each practitioner thinks there's one magic way to get a machine to be smart, andso they're all wasting their time in a sense. On the other hand, each of them isimproving some particular method, so maybe someday in the near future, or maybeit's two generations away, someone else will come around and say, "Let's put allthese together," and then it will be smart.

Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.

Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, andthat little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like tobelieve that these fragments have meanings in themselves-apart from the greatwebs of structure from which they emerge-and indeed this illusion is valuable tous qua thinkers-but not to us as psychologists-because it leads us to think thatexpressible knowledge is the first thing to study.

All intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints -limitations on space, time, and materials.

It makes no sense to seek a single best way to represent knowledge-because eachparticular form of expression also brings its particular limitations. Forexample, logic-based systems are very precise, but they make it hard to doreasoning with analogies. Similarly, statistical systems are useful for makingpredictions, but do not serve well to represent the reasons why thosepredictions are sometimes correct.

When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot ofexcitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; hehad no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.

Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makesno difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But itmakes all the difference when there are many cars!

How hard is it to build an intelligent machine? I don't think it's so hard, butthat's my opinion, and I've written two books on how I think one should doit. The basic idea I promote is that you mustn't look for a magic bullet. Youmustn't look for one wonderful way to solve all problems. Instead you want tolook for 20 or 30 ways to solve different kinds of problems. And to build somekind of higher administrative device that figures out what kind of problem youhave and what method to use.

Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end ofeverything we know.

But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does what it isworks but what it does when it's stuck.

It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be towatch the random dots on untuned television screens.

We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how peopleprocess it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into thepsychological details of its creation and absorption.

Theorems often tell us complex truths about the simple things, but only rarelytell us simple truths about the complex ones. To believe otherwise is wishfulthinking or "mathematics envy.

There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, thosecaptured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.

But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery ofplanetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empiricalexplorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science,eventually.

Experience has shown that science frequently develops most fruitfully once welearn to examine the things that seem the simplest, instead of those that seemthe most mysterious.

We turn to quantities when we can't compare the qualities of things.

We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning,planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was beingexplored by Patrick Winston.

I believed in realism, as summarized by John McCarthy's comment to the effectthat if we worked really hard, we'd have an intelligent system in from four tofour hundred years.

A couple of hundred years from now, maybe [science fiction writers] Isaac Asimovand Fred Pohl will be considered the important philosophers of the twentiethcentury, and the professional philosophers will almost all be forgotten, becausethey're just shallow and wrong, and their ideas aren't very powerful.

What would a Martian visitor think to see a human being laugh? It must looktruly horrible: the sight of furious gestures, flailing limbs, and thoraxheaving in frenzied contortions...

To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe isone of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questionslike, "What caused the Universe to exist?"

You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.

In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.

Eventually, robots will make everything.

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolatingchildren's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates itschildren better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than itexplains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

Everything is similar if you're willing to look far out of focus.

This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculusproblem - and in particular to perform integration - you have to be smart aboutwhich integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions,integration by parts, and so on.

By the way, it was his simulations that helped out in Jurassic Park - withoutthem, there would have been only a few dinosaurs. Based on his techniques,Industrial Light and Magic could make whole herds of dinosaurs race across thescreen.

There are three basic approaches to AI: Case-based, rule-based, andconnectionist reasoning.

The nature of mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways itsagents cross-connect. ...it's only what we must expect from evolution'scountless tricks.

Seymour Papert

The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather thanprovide ready-made knowledge.

You can't teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do isposition them where they can find what they need to know when they need to knowit.

I am convinced that the best learning takes place when the learner takes charge.

Nothing could be more absurd than an experiment in which computers are placed ina classroom where nothing else is changed.

Every maker of video games knows something that the makers of curriculum don'tseem to understand. You'll never see a video game being advertised as beingeasy. Kids who do not like school will tell you it's not because it's toohard. It's because it's--boring

The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a[student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.

One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, thechild programs the computer, and in doing so, both acquires a sense of masteryover a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes anintense contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics,and from the art of intellectual model building.

The goal is to teach in such a way as to produce the most learning from the least teaching.

You can't think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking aboutsomething.

The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of scienceeducation underlying this project. From constructivist theories of psychology wetake a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission ofknowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea thatlearning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences asconstructing a meaningful product.

Basic idea is that programming is the most powerful medium of developing thesophisticated and rigorous thinking needed for mathematics, for grammar, forphysics, for statistics, for all the "hard" subjects.... In short, I believemore than ever that programming should be a key part of the intellectualdevelopment of people growing up.

Rather than pushing children to think like adults, we might do better toremember that they are great learners and to try harder to be more like them.

Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school bytelling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, theyare places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization...Ithink schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teachingchildren to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive anddisrespectful to their own developmental capacities.

We imagine a school in which students and teachers excitedly and joyfullystretch themselves to their limits in pursuit of projects built on theirvision...not one that succeeds in making apathetic students satisfying minimalstandards.

Do away with curriculum. Do away with segregation by age. And do away with theidea that there should be uniformity of all schools and of what people learn.

The reason most kids don't like school is not that the work is too hard, butthat it is utterly boring.

It's not what you know about the computer that's important, but your ability todo things with it. By studying French in an academic setting, you get to know alot about it, but typically, you can't express yourself well or have aninteresting conversation with it.

There's a tendency to make jazzy educational software that's very uniform andtherefore just like school. I'd like to see a company develop software forrebellious kids who don't want to go to school.

Now more people are doing work that requires individual decision-making andproblem-solving, and we need an educational system that will help develop thoseskills.

We often treat children as if they're not very competent to do anything on theirown. So we make them stop learning in a natural way - by exploring. Logo [thecomputer programming language ] allows them to find their way around thecomputer, as they would find their way around the house, uncontaminated by thebureaucracies of schools.

I prefer software where kids build something and run into problems they have tosolve.

Parents can learn that parental authority doesn't depend on knowingeverything. The more you pretend, the more risk that it'll be traumatic anddamaging to the kids and their relationship with you when they find out thetruth.

For what is important when we give children a theorem to use is not that theyshould memorize it. What matters most is that by growing up with a few verypowerful theorems one comes to appreciate how certain ideas can be used as toolsto think with over a lifetime. One learns to enjoy and to respect the power ofpowerful ideas. One learns that the most powerful idea of all is the idea ofpowerful ideas.

Our goal in education should be to foster the ability to use the computer ineverything you do, even if you don't have a specific piece of software for thejob.

We should think about what we mean by literacy. If you say, "He's a veryliterate person," what you really mean is that he knows a lot, thinks a lot, hasa certain frame of mind that comes through reading and knowing about varioussubjects.The major route open to literacy has been through reading and writingtext. But we're seeing new media offer richer ways to explore knowledge andcommunicate, through sound and pictures.

Terry Winograd

Ultimately, we are seeking a better understanding of what is means to behuman. In this quest, progress is not made by finding the "right" answers, butby asking meaningful questions.

The main activity of programming is not the origination of new independentprograms, but in the integration, modification, and explanation of existingones.

There is a tendency to throw computers at third world problems, which I think isoften a distraction. Putting computers in the schools is great, but it may bemore important to put teachers in the schools.

In the next 50 years, the increasing importance of designing spaces for humancommunication and interaction will lead to expansion in those aspects ofcomputing that are focused on people, rather than machinery.

The techniques of artificial intelligence are to the mind what bureaucracy is tohuman social interaction.

A reason to have computers understand natural language is that it's an extremelyeffective way of communicating. What I came to realize is that the success ofthe communication depends on the real intelligence on the part of the listener,and that there are many other ways of communicating with a computer that can bemore effective, given that it doesn't have the intelligence.

Nos amis de Google

Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimatesearch engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understandexactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowherenear doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and thatis basically what we work on.Larry Page, October 2000

Google will fulfill its mission only when its search engine is AI-complete. Youguys know what that means? That’s artificial intelligence.Larry Page, May 2002 (The Big Switch, page 212)

The ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you wanted when youtyped in a query, and it would give you the exact right thing back, in computerscience we call that artificial intelligence. That means it would be smart, andwe’re a long way from having smart computers.Larry Page, November 2002

HAL had a lot of information, could piece it together, could rationalizeit. Hopefully it would never have a bug like HAL did where he killed theoccupants of the spaceship. But that [level of artificial intelligence] is whatwe’re striving for, and I think we’ve made it a part of the way there.- Sergey Brin, November 2002

If you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or anrtificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.-Sergey Brin, 2004

“Every time I talk about Google’s future with Larry Page, he argues that it willbecome an artificial intelligence.- Steve Jurvetson, January 2005

We are not scanning all those books to be read by people, we are scanning themto be read by an AI.- Unidentified Google engineer, October 2005

One of our big goals in search is to make search that really understandsexactly what you want, understands everything in the world. As computerscientists, we call that artificial intelligence.-Larry Page, October 2005

The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world. It wouldunderstand everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thinginstantly. You could ask ‘what should I ask Larry?’ and it would tell you.Larry Page, May 2006

People always make the assumption that we’re done with search. That’s very farfrom the case. We’re probably only 5% of the way there. We want to create theultimate search engine that can understand anything. Some people could call thatartificial intelligence.May 2006

Google wants to be the best in search. To reach that goal Google wants to havethe world’s top AI research laboratory.Google internal company paper, October 2006

One of my favourite things is artificial intelligence, but it has gotten a verybad rap, but my prediction is that when AI happens it’s going to be a lot ofcomputation and not so much clever algorithms but just a lot of computation. Mytheory is that if you look at your programming, your DNA, it’s about 600megabytes compressed, so it’s smaller than any modern operating system, smallerthan Linux or Windows or anything like that, your whole operating system, thatincludes booting up your brain. So your program algorithms probably aren’t thatcomplicated, it’s probably more about the overall computation. We have somepeople at Google who are trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it ona large scale to make search better. Very few [other] people are working onthis, and I don’t think it’s as far off as people think.Larry Page, February 2007

We want Google to be the third half of your brain.(Brin)

Your mind is tremendously efficient at weighing an enormous amount of information. We want to make smarter search engines that do a lot of the work for us. The smarter we can make the search engine, the better. Where will it lead? Who knows? But it’s credible to imagine a leap as great as that from hunting through library stacks to a Google session, when we leap from today’s search engines to having the entirety of the world’s information as just one of our thoughts.Brin, (September, 2004)